Technology

Disney and Sony Pictures have signed a multi-year “content licensing agreement” that will bring new Sony theatrical releases, starting with its 2022 films, to Disney-owned platforms. The deal also gives Disney the rights to many of Sony’s older films, including Spider-Man titles — meaning that movies starring the web-slinger, which are notably absent from Disney Plus’ collection of Marvel films, could eventually make their way to the streaming service. Sony’s theatrical releases from 2022 through 2026 are included in the deal, and Disney will get access to them following their “Pay 1 TV window.” Starting in 2022, that window, which follows a film’s theatrical and home video runs, will be owned by Netflix, thanks to a deal announced earlier this month. (That means new Sony films will hit th...

Google has announced some new features coming to Chromebooks, including the company’s Live Captions feature that will be added to Chrome on “most” Chrome OS devices in the coming weeks. Once Live Captions are available, users can flip them on in the accessibility settings to get captions for any media with audio right inside their browser. The feature rolled out to Chrome on Windows, Mac, and Linux in March. Google is also beefing up the Chrome OS Launcher, which lets you search for files and apps, with some new capabilities, allowing you make simple calculations and check the weather, the definition of a word, and stock prices. Searching for weather in the Launcher.Image: Google The search giant is also adding a new Diagnostics app to Chrome OS that lets you check the status of and run te...

Amazon One is expanding to its biggest area yet: the company is now testing its palm-scanning payment technology in Whole Foods, starting with a single store in Amazon’s home city of Seattle. The company has been using Amazon One payment technology in its Amazon-branded stores in the Seattle area (including Amazon Go and Amazon Books), but the Whole Foods rollout will make the most substantial expansion of the technology yet. The company says that thousands of customers have already signed up with Amazon One. According to an Amazon FAQ, the palm-scanning technology analyzes “the minute characteristics of your palm — both surface-area details like lines and ridges as well as subcutaneous features such as vein patterns” in order to identify a customer, allowing them to use the biometric scan...

Get ready for Twitter to start looking a whole lot crisper — starting today, the company is letting all users tweet (and view) pictures in 4K on iOS and Android. Twitter’s web app already supports higher-resolution images (at up to 4096 x 4096 resolution), but the mobile apps had been limited to just half that, with a maximum resolution of 2048 x 2048. The company had previously started testing the 4K image upload option for mobile users earlier this year, and it seems those tests went well, as its now rolling out the feature to all users starting today. Time to Tweet those high res pics –– the option to upload and view 4K images on Android and iOS is now available for everyone. To start uploading and viewing images in 4K, update your high-quality image preferences in “Data usage” settings...

Microsoft is releasing a new stylus for classroom use: the Classroom Pen 2. The pen will be available on April 27th and will be sold directly to schools. The company launched its first Classroom Pen in 2019. That stylus sold for $39.99 per unit. It was compatible with any device that supported the MPP protocol (including a number of non-Surface Windows devices). Microsoft is going even more budget with this release. The Pen 2 will be sold to schools in packs of 20 for $399.80, which works out to $19.99 per pen. Per Microsoft’s blog post, however, it seems like this pen may only be optimized for Microsoft’s own Surface Pro and Surface Go devices — other Windows devices aren’t mentioned. [embedded content] Microsoft claims that the device has an “improved design” from the previous model, tho...

Early in development, before the team at Deck Nine Games had settled on a main character or even a story for the next Life is Strange game, they knew the general theme they wanted to tackle. “We did know early on that we wanted to explore empathy,” says Felice Kuan, senior staff writer on Life is Strange: True Colors. “We were particularly interested in pushing that concept as far as we could.” The result was Alex Chen, a new protagonist who has the power to see, experience, and manipulate the emotions of those around her. At the outset of the game — which launches in September — Alex moves back home to live with her brother, who then dies in an accident. She’s forced to use her powers to find out exactly what happened. “We were looking for a protagonist who would have some vulnerability a...

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has proposed banning police from buying access to user data from data brokers, including ones that “illegitimately obtained” their records — like, its sponsors say, the facial recognition service Clearview AI. The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act is sponsored by a bipartisan group including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), and 18 other members of the Senate. The bill would make law enforcement agencies obtain a court order before accessing people’s personal information through third-party brokers — companies that aggregate and sell information like detailed user location data, surreptitiously gathered from smartphone apps or other sources. Wyden announced the bill last year in an interview with The Verge, following reports that several gover...

Google is refreshing its Meet user interface next month for desktop and laptop users. The new Meet for web interface includes improvements to video feeds, how you view or present meetings, and the navigation bar. While some of Google’s changes are playing catch-up to what’s offered in Zoom or Microsoft Teams, they are much-needed additions. If you’re fed up of seeing your own face during calls, you’ll soon be able to minimize or hide it entirely. New options will also include the ability to place your own video feed in a tile in the grid of meeting participants, or a floating picture that can be resized and repositioned. Google Meet will soon let you adjust your own video feed position.Image: Google If you’re busy presenting, Google is also improving how content is pinned and unpinned. You...

Apple’s latest iPad Pro might look very similar to the model it’s replacing, but it contains several major upgrades on the inside. It’s got the same powerful, energy-efficient M1 chip as the latest MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and now the redesigned iMac. Cellular models have made the jump to 5G. The front-facing camera can zoom and pan to keep you in focus on video calls. But aside from the processor, the biggest technical leap is exclusive to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro: it’s what Apple calls the “Liquid Retina XDR,” a new display that adopts Mini LED backlighting to achieve higher brightness and greater contrast than any iPad (or Mac) that the company has ever made. Apple says the 12.9-inch iPad Pro can reach 1,000 nits of full-screen brightness — on par with the ultra-expensi...

Gogoro is branching out of home country Taiwan in the biggest way yet, as it just announced a partnership with major two-wheeler manufacturer Hero MotorCorp to bring its swappable battery and scooter tech to India. As part of the deal, Hero will build electric scooters based around Gogoro’s tech, and will also install Gogoro’s battery-swapping stations in cities throughout the country. Electric vehicles could help eat away at some of India’s pollution, and Tesla is even wading into the market. But building out charging infrastructure to handle passenger EVs is going to be a challenge for any company that wants to build a business there. It’s a different story for scooters, and especially the ones made by Gogoro, which was founded by a pair of former HTC executives a decade ago. For one thi...

Apple has confirmed that the digital pan and zoom feature of the new M1 iPad Pro’s front-facing camera can work with any video conferencing app, not just FaceTime. That opens the door for popular apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams to make remote work and e-learning blend more seamlessly into the realities of pandemic life — a hybrid lifestyle that’s likely to continue even after the outbreak subsides. Center Stage, as Apple brands it, keeps video conferencing participants properly framed even as they move about a room by combining machine learning with a fixed 12-megapixel sensor touting an ultra-wide 122‑degree field of view. We’ve seen similar tracking on the Portal TV, Echo Show 10, and even the Xbox Kinect accessory. But those are niche devices compared to the iPad, which saw sales sur...

The FBI says it used facial recognition technology to track down and arrest an individual suspected of taking part in the US Capitol riots earlier this year. The case, which was first reported by The Huffington Post, is notable for the FBI’s acknowledgement that it used facial recognition not just to confirm a suspect’s identity, but to discover it in the first place. According to an affidavit shared online by the Huffington Post, federal agents tracked down an individual named Stephen Chase Randolph using crowdsourced images from the riots (including those shared on Twitter by a group known as SeditionHunters). They searched these pictures on the web using “an open source facial recognition tool, known to provide reliable results,” and this led to a public Instagram page apparently belong...